Exclusive Features

Linron Co.

Linron expands its sales market with the launch of decorative overlay flooring it expects to become a significant portion of the business.

By Janice Hoppe-Spiers, Senior Editor at Knighthouse Media

For the past 25 years, Linron Co. has provided floor covering for more than 18,000 retail stores nationwide and covered 2.2 billion square feet. Known as the nation’s leading national accounts distributor for retail chain stores today, the company built its reputation on excellence in customer service.

The Houston-based company was co-founded more than two decades ago by flooring industry veterans Linda Krienke and Ron Harris. The longtime friends met in 1977 when they worked together for a flooring distributor in Texas. In 1993, they decided to start their own company and Linron was born.

“We built this company on service and one word we have never used is ‘no,’” Krienke says. “I’ve gotten calls at 4 p.m. on a Friday from someone who needs flooring tomorrow and there is nothing easy about it, but we take the extra step and get it done. We have always been based on our service.”

As the experts in flooring, Linron offers its clients turnkey solutions. The company will assess the client’s current floors to determine what work is needed. Linron continues to work closely with its clients to choose the best flooring material, as well as the best contractor suited for the job within their region.

In 2013, the company created a preferred flooring division to ensure the flooring was installed properly. “There are so many manufacturing brands and we would get complaints it was bad material and we were traveling constantly to look at jobs,” Krienke remembers. “It wasn’t the product; it was the people. We created this program and literally our complaints went from 50 to two per year because we monitor the job and people doing the installation.”

Linron has partnered with Armstrong Flooring, a leading manufacturer of innovative flooring products, since 2015. “They have been a premier manufacturer and overall they have done amazing marketing and things for individual contractors,” Krienke says. “They are considered the top manufacturer and that’s who we are with now.”

Armstrong Flooring named Linron its Recycler of the Year in 2016 and 2017. Over the past four years, Linron has recycled 50 million pounds of vinyl composition tile through the Armstrong Flooring On&On Recycling Program. “Recycling has become a major focus,” Krienke notes. “Everything on the floor is torn up and sent back to the manufacturer and recycled into a new material.”

Decorative Overlay

Polished concrete took off in 2004 as the material of choice for retail flooring, but it was sold on the fact that it didn’t need to be maintained. Although retailers have discovered that a maintenance program is indeed required for concrete flooring it is still popular,” Krienke says.

Linron has begun offering decorative overlays that can feature glass, oyster shells, different colors or anything a client requests. “It is amazing,” Krienke says. “This is for boutique-type stores and even residential properties. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it turn into a billion-dollar industry.”

Although decorative overlay has the same type of ingredients as concrete, it is a little different. “With concrete, you can only polish that slab so many times before getting into aggregate, so it’s difficult to maintain the cleanliness of it,” Krienke explains. “When we do the overlay, we put down a sealer and primer first to stabilize it better before pouring it and adding in glass or whatever decorative feature. You go back every year or so to put this polish on it to keep it refreshed and that’s hard to do with concrete. For example, if you go into a store with concrete flooring and knock a jar of pickles off the shelf it will stain the floor and you can’t get it out. With overlay it won’t stick.”

The biggest challenge Linron faces with decorative overlay is reassuring its clients of the product quality because it is so new. To combat that, the company is hosting pour demonstrations at its headquarters so clients can see how the flooring is done and the end-result.

A 10,000-square-foot boutique retailer, for example, can place decorative overlay in their shop and be up and running in 48 hours. “The products we use dry very fast,” Krienke says. “We can go in to perform the demo, pour the floor and they can do business that next day and it looks fabulous. People are not creatures of change, but to be able to convince them they will enjoy looking at it and that the maintenance will be low will be our biggest challenge.”

Adding decorative overlay to its portfolio has opened the doors for Linron to provide a unique, one-of-a-kind look to boutique stores and has even seen an interest from the residential market. Previously the company had only supplied flooring for commercial properties. Residential contractors are approaching the company at trade shows to learn more about decorative overlay for their custom homes. “This product is still pretty new and growing, but we expect in two years it will be 25 to 35 percent of the business,” Krienke says.

Decorative overlay is just one of the ways Linron plans to continue to remain an industry leader moving forward. “Even if we stay the level we are now I’m OK with that,” Krienke says. “Ron and I are going to be retiring and our children have been working here for years. We built the company for our children who plan to continue to grow the business. We trained them for so many years and made them work harder than anyone else because it is our legacy for our children.”